Management Accounting Practices and the Role of Management Accountant: Evidence from Manufacturing Companies throughout Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Management Accounting can be defined as management-oriented accounting or accounting in relation to management function. The rapid changing of business environment lately is significantly changing the management accounting practices and the role of management accountant in an organization. Management accounting should move from administrative level to the srtrategic ones, from “bean counters” to “busines partners”. The main focus of management accounting has always been to improve the organization performance and profitability by providing relevant information for planning, controlling and decision making. The research’s samples are 46 manufacturing companies throughout Jogyakarta, that consist of 30 medium-scale companies and 16 big-scale companies. This paper tries to provide evidence from management accountant who work in manufacturing companies. The research also tries to measure whether the management accounting practices, the role of management accountant and the factors driving the changes are different between the two groups. By using two variables in measuring the management accounting practices, the result indicated that Budgeting was consider the most important managerial tools in management accounting practices for both medium and big-scale comnpanies. However, there was a significantly difference in management accounting task. the most important task for management accounting for medium scale-companies was increasing profit (83,3%) but preparing the budget was for big-scale ones (93,8%). We can conclude that, in general, the management accounting practices were still on traditional perpectives. rank (33,3%)among them in medium scale companies but in the 3 Compare to their peers, management accountant position was perceived as the 4rd rank (31,3%) for the big ones. Consistent to the first finding, this research also found that management accountant still perceived as operational managers for all respondents, 100% big-scale and 95,7% medium-scale companies perceived management accountants as the budget preparer and cost controller. The research also revelaed that there was a significant difference in perceiving the factors drives the management accountant’s role in organizations. The development of accounting information technology (accounting software) was consider the most important factor for big-scale (68,8%), whereas the market demand on product quality was perveived as the most important factor for medium scale companies (53,3%)